August 24, 2007

Sole Man

The current debate over our trade imbalance with China, and news stories about lax quality control in Chinese factories, came home this month.

My two pairs of Florsheim shoes, each about one year old, fell apart in the same week.

Like most American men, I suspect, I only have a few pairs of shoes. For work I have --- well, I had --- the brown shoes and the black shoes. I've been buying Florsheims since high school, first at Rubinstein's on Fifth Avenue, and then via the Internet after Rubinstein's closed.

Florsheims used to be American-made, and then they were made in South America. The last two pair were made in China.

In the past, I always wore the soles out --- in fact, one pair was resoled twice. But I never had Florsheims split apart along the upper until I got these latest, Chinese-made shoes. The talented Anthony Macchiaroli at Valley Shoe Repair in North Versailles says they're unsalvageable.

So, to quote "South Park": "You go to hell, Florsheim! You go to hell and you die!"

. . .

Where could I get a good pair of American-made shoes (actually, two) at a price I could afford?

My preference is to buy locally, but finding a locally-owned shoe store in the Mon-Yough area isn't easy. Gordon's Shoes at the Homestead Waterfront is about the last option. There's also Ponsi Shoes in North Huntingdon, but they sell mostly orthopedics, and while I may act like I'm ready for the nursing home, I'm not quite there yet.

The next step was to find a shoe company still manufacturing in the United States. It's not easy. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 98 percent of the shoes sold in this country last year were imported, mostly from you-know-where.

A website called U.S. Stuff helped, but it's not being updated very often, and unfortunately most of the updates are of this nature: "out of business ... closed the factory July 2005 ... closed its only US operation ... now importing all shoes ... all made outside USA."

. . .

Naturally, the companies' websites try to hide where their plants are located. Plenty stress "American style" or "American tradition" or "American craftsmanship" or talk about how their founder opened his first shoe factory in Maine or Michigan or Minnesota in 1898.

They don't brag about the fact that they laid off 1,400 workers a few years ago or shipped all of the machinery to China.

To learn which companies still made shoes here, I looked for articles in newspapers; doing Google searches for "(company name)" + "shoes" + "factory" + "closed" was, sadly, very helpful.

. . .

Price and value are important. One company that makes almost all of its shoes in the United States is Allen Edmonds. They also make an excellent product. But you pay for that quality, and I can't afford shoes that cost $300 per pair. I needed something in the Florsheim price range of $100 to $150.

I also didn't want horribly ugly shoes. I found a lot of steel-toed work shoes and boots made in the United States, but I wasn't about to clomp around all day like Herman Munster.

. . .

Well, believe it or not, I found one pair of shoes not only made in America, but made in Pennsylvania, and only about two hours away. The Cove Shoe Company of Martinsburg, Blair County, makes private-label dress shoes as well as Corcoran and Matterhorn boots. I ordered a pair of black dress Oxfords from them.

Cost? $120, or about what I paid for the last pair of Florsheims.

Cove's products are aimed at the military, police officers, postal workers, and other public employees who have to buy American-made shoes, so the pair I just got will win no awards for cutting-edge style. But they're handsome, fit well, have a thick, Vibram sole, and feel really sturdy.

And after a day or two to break them in, they are comfortable. (They have to be ... cops and postal workers are on their feet all day.) Places that sell uniforms might have them; I ordered mine through a website called Shoeline.com.

Shoeline.com is owned by H.H. Brown Shoe Co., which is controlled by Warren Buffett. If you search on the keyword "USA," you'll find all of the items they carry that are made in the United States.

That led me to another of Buffett's companies that's still making shoes in the United States, Dexter Shoe Co. Many Dexter shoes are sourced from overseas, but some are still American-made; so I ordered a spiffy pair of American-made brown dress shoes from them.

. . .

If you need shoes and want to buy American, first, rots of ruck, and second, I hope this information helps you.

One thing frosts me, though. Cove Shoe can make a comfortable, solid, good-looking product right here in Pennsylvania, and sell it at a competitive price.

That tells me that Wal-Mart, Target, DSW, Payless, etc., could stock American-made shoes --- and other products --- if they wanted to.

They'd rather lower their manufacturing costs and their quality, and keep the money they save rather than pass it along to consumers. Because the prices of, say, Florsheim shoes haven't dropped in the last 10 years. In fact, they've gone up significantly.

Where does the excess money go?

Did you say "executive compensation"? Shoe better believe it.

. . .

To Do This Weekend: McKeesport Little Theater, 1614 Coursin St., holds auditions for "Over the River and Through the Woods" from Sunday and Monday night. Men and women ages 25 to 35 and 55 to 75 are needed. Call (412) 673-1100 ... Resurrection Church, 3909 Donna Ave., West Mifflin, holds a chicken parmigiana dinner and bake sale from 12 to 6 p.m. Sunday. Call (412) 461-8087.

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Posted at 12:00 am by Jason Togyer
Filed Under: Mon Valley Miscellany | one comment | Link To This Entry

August 23, 2007

Pennsylvanians, in the Shadows of Life

I have a friend who works at a group home for the severely mentally ill. They're mostly former patients of Western Center, the state-run psychiatric hospital in Cecil Township that closed for good in 2000. For reasons you can guess, I'm not going to identify this person in any way.

My friend has been after me for sometime to write an "expose" on the private health-care company that runs the group home. I try to tell my friend that if no one wants to go on the record or cooperate, an expose becomes difficult if not impossible. And any sources who would cooperate could face legal repercussions.

Nevertheless, I've heard some stories that would curl my hair, if I had any left. The patients in my friend's group home are not functional adults who can participate in meaningful, mainstream activities. They have extreme emotional and developmental problems.

So when the state announced it plans to close Mayview State Hospital, I emailed my friend. "What do you think?" I said.

"Oh, (expletive), they'll be sending them down here," my friend replied. "I'll probably end up with Richard Baumhammers." Well, no. Baumhammers, a former lawyer who went on a racism-fueled shooting rampage in 2000, was eventually ruled competent to stand trial and is now on death row.

. . .

But Baumhammers was marginally successful at navigating society, at least until his internal demons drove him to a deadly burst of violence. My tongue is only partly in my cheek when I say someone like Baumhammers would be an improvement over the patients in my friend's group home:

• One patient eats his own excrement.



• Another can't be exposed to strange people; he attacks them without provocation. (This, as you might expect, makes it hard for them to hire new staff.)



• Another has to wear a football helmet everywhere for his own protection, because he is prone to banging his head against the wall.

You might think that a group home environment at least allows them to participate in some outside activities that they didn't have access to at Western Center. You might be wrong. Most of the patients spend their days medicated, watching TV. If my friend can wrangle the company's van for a day trip, he takes them to Wal-Mart to walk around and have ice cream.

A few patients more highly socialized and more functional are allowed limited excursions on their own. One recently was sent on a day trip to Niagara Falls. My friend asked him what he liked best. "I had cake," he replied.

The company for which my friend works hires "aides" who work for little more than minimum wage, and have minimum training. Few have any background in social work, nursing or some related field; they quit as soon as they find a better-paying job.

About 9,000 people are now in these group homes in Pennsylvania. A report by then-auditor general Bob Casey Jr. sharply criticized the level of care and the Department of Public Welfare's response to the problems, calling it an "abomination."

. . .

Now, the Rendell administration, DPW and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania want to dump more of these patients into group homes.

This obviously isn't helping the patients. It's not doing anything for the communities where the group homes are located.

The only people that are being enriched by the closing of state hospitals are those who operate group homes ... and developers who are salivating at the thought of buying the 335-acre Mayview property.

After all, Southpointe, the very successful commercial and residential development in Washington County, was built on the former Western Center property. And the "Kilbuck landslide" was the result of an attempt to build a shopping center on the former Dixmont State Hospital property.

My friend, who's fairly conservative, objects to the cost of maintaining a network of group homes and sending patients on outings at taxpayer's expense when, he says, they don't get any benefit.

The tax expense doesn't bother me if patients receive better care in group homes than in state-run mental health facilities. But group homes are clearly just warehouses. How is that an improvement over the services provided by Mayview or Western Center?

. . .

The movement to close mental hospitals developed in the 1960s and '70s after stories of abusive treatment became endemic. And a lot of people had been committed to mental hospitals who weren't disturbed at all --- people with Down's syndrome or clinical depression, for instance. They should never had been locked away. They deserved a chance to participate in society.

But there is clearly a small group of people who require 24-hour monitoring and professional care. The patients who remain in state hospitals are not bad people, but they are not capable of normal adult activities on any level.

In 2000, the family of a patient at Polk Center sued when the state tried to move her into a group home. A psychiatric evaluation determined the woman had an IQ of 14 and the mental age of a 25-month-old child. Workers at the group home were making $6.31 per hour and had no training in skilled nursing.

Washington County Commissioner Bracken Burns told the Observer-Reporter last week that he supports the rights of the mentally handicapped to live in the community. "I also recognize there are some individuals who are so severely mentally handicapped that they are not safe members of that community," he says.

I can't possibly argue with that. Neither would my friend.

. . .

Former senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey said the quality of a society "is measured by how it treats those in the dawn of life, in the dusk of life. and most importantly in the shadow of life."

We're not doing a very good job treating people at the "dawn of life":

• Pennsylvania has long been in the bottom-half of the nation in terms of infant mortality rates.



• Speaking of infant mortality, between 1990 and 2004 we went from No. 30 in the nation to No. 27 ... a three-point climb in 14 years is nothing to be proud of.



• The number of children in poverty in Pennsylvania also puts us in the bottom-half of the nation.

By closing facilities like Mayview, we're doing wrong by people in the "shadows" of life, too.

The only ones left getting a fair shake in Pennsylvania are those in the "dusk" of life, our senior citizens. I guess it's no surprise that they're the people who vote in this state.

Still, instead of coming up with new marketing slogans every 10 months, I'd like to see our local and state governments spend more time caring for the least of our society and less time trying to line the pockets of campaign contributors.

And although it's not a federal issue, where does Bob Casey Jr. stand on this problem today? Surely a U.S. senator would have a bully pulpit to advocate for Mayview patients.

Maybe if we improved the "quality" of Pennsylvania society, we wouldn't need to market ourselves quite so vigorously --- and unsuccessfully.

So, who will be the first political leader to demonstrate some leadership on the Mayview situation?

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Posted at 12:00 am by Jason Togyer
Filed Under: Good Government On The March, Politics | No comments | Link To This Entry

August 21, 2007

Unbuilt McKeesport

The late Andrew "Greeky" Jakomas still gets a lot of abuse --- not all of it undeserved --- for things he did and shouldn't have done, or for things he should have done, and didn't.

But anyone who loves the city should be grateful to Jakomas, a two-term mayor and longtime councilman, and other leaders of the 1950s and '60s for not building this monstrosity on Fifth Avenue at Huey Street.

I stumbled across this undated architect's rendering while looking for something entirely unrelated in the archives of McKeesport Heritage Center. No date was attached, but I'd suspect it's from roughly 1957.

According to the accompanying caption from the Daily News, this $800,000, five-story structure was proposed by the McKeesport Planning Commission. It would have included a 184-car parking garage with a new city hall on the top floor and storefronts on the lower level, along with "a modern supper club," and "a sun deck and recreation area."

The location --- presently a vacant lot across Fifth Avenue from the back of the Sunoco station, and ironically near the current City Hall --- was then a slum area slated for clearance.

As you can see, this building combines all of the charm of the Lysle Boulevard parking garage with the architecture of an East German prison.

Someday soon, I'll write a defense of the city hall that was built in 1959, which currently houses the police and fire departments. I'm one of the few people I know who likes it.

No, it's not a great building, but it has some handsome lines and it genuinely makes me smile when I see it, especially when the lobby is lit up at night.

But whatever you think of the 1959 city hall, you have to admit it's a Greek temple compared to this rotten building. How would you like to work on the top floor, breathing carbon monoxide fumes all day long? And what would the lower floors looked like when the concrete became stained with salt and soot, or when the parking deck began to leak into the stores on the first floor?

By the late 1950s, the handwriting was on the wall for Downtown, and McKeesport planners were desperately trying to compete with suburban shopping malls. The short-lived pedestrian mall on Fifth Avenue was one attempt. Midtown Plaza was another.

In all likelihood, this white elephant would have fared no better than they did. If there's such a thing as "addition by subtraction," then the failure to build this city hall/parking garage/shopping center was a huge civic improvement.

. . .

Meanwhile, Back in The Present: If I'm not writing at the Almanac, then I'm probably pitching in over at Pittsburgh Radio & TV Online, operated by my friend and cow-orker Eric O'Brien for almost 10 years now.

Right now you can read about a format change at a station in Erie or digital TV or even see Karl Rove with hair. Out of all of the websites covering radio and television in Pittsburgh, it's definitely one of them.

Also, Tube City Online has a new look, with help from local photographer and railroad journalist and historian Rich Borkowski Jr.

. . .

In Other Business: As predicted by the Almanac back in April, subscribers of the Daily News started getting the Sunday Tribune-Review this weekend. (Admittedly, it didn't take the prognostication skills of Kreskin to predict this. The Trib wants to boost its Sunday circulation in Allegheny County, because higher circulation means it can charge higher advertising rates.)

The News, which has never had a Sunday edition, is a six-day-per-week paper, and the Trib is being delivered to its subscribers at no extra cost ... whether they want it or not.

Traditionally, a lot of News carriers have also delivered the Sunday Post-Gazette and before that, the Press, so I'm going to guess that a few subscribers aren't thrilled about getting two Sunday papers ... especially if they don't like the Trib.

I wonder how much a Daily News subscriber has to pay to not get the Tribune-Review? (Rimshot.)

I'm ambivalent, because I don't get the Sunday P-G, but I don't think the Sunday Trib is any prize, either. (The normal caveats apply to my opinions and/or credibility.)

At least Sunday's Trib included a nice profile of McKeesport Mayor Jim Brewster by Jennifer Vertullo of the News. Vertullo has also demonstrated a pretty keen eye for taking good photos, too, which is not a skill that many writers master.

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Posted at 12:00 am by Jason Togyer
Filed Under: Good Government On The March, History, Politics | No comments | Link To This Entry